At long last the cabin has new windows

It took a while for me to save my pennies because ... and this might come as a shock ... windows are ridiculously expensive. And when you want to punch holes in walls and add whole new windows? Yeah, not cheap.

First let's take a quick tour to see the Before.

Outside. Crappy old door, trim in terrible shape, and it's clear that the decking needs to be replaced soon (my current hope and plan is that that will happen by the fall).

Apparently I've been living for the last 20 years with a front door that was primed, meaning that at any time I could have painted it a nice fun color. But no one ever told me! 

The kitchen. The next project, before new decking, is to replace all the cabinets with something a bit more 21st century.

Don't judge the clutter. 

The living room. We've been unable to open this window for years because the screen let in ALL THE BUGS. And the slider was becoming pretty cumbersome. 

The bathroom. We remodeled the bathroom a couple of years ago but I always wanted a window above the shower. 

Hello Bear says hello. 

The bedroom (I'm just showing one of the two bedrooms ... the other one looks the same except with better windows). 

And the front door. Again, I was NOT HAPPY to learn that this ugly door had just been primed and I could have painted it at any time over the last 20 years. 

Now for the After. 

The kitchen. I ... I just can't express how much better this is now. One extra window has opened up the entire living space. It feels so much brighter, and somehow bigger. 

 

Hmm...apparently I didn't take any new pix of the living room. Suffice to say the new slider is quiet and doesn't require all of your strength to open and close, I can no longer feel arctic breezes on my neck coming from the window, and I'll be able to open and close it! The cross-breezes are going to be AMAZING come spring and summer. 

On to the bathroom. Again, the new window just opens everything up. All weekend I kept thinking someone had left the light on because sunlight was just POURING out of the room. Showers will be much more pleasant in the spring and summer!

The bedroom. Because I wanted a way to get to my Future Awesome Screened-In Porch from the house without going outside and letting all the bugs in, I decided we needed a slider in the bedroom. And again, this room feels about twice as large now. 

The front door. I have no words for how much I love this new door. It is a beautiful color, it doesn't need to be slammed with all your might to close, and it has a shade built right into the glass. I get all the light I wanted, my husband gets the security he wanted (without hanging a sheet over the door whenever we're not there). We also installed a new electronic lock. 

I now see that we really need new rugs. Ew. 

Here's a shot of the kitchen with the door. 

So much light! 

And finally, here's the exterior of the cabin with door blinds up and down. The window installers were nice enough to paint the trim green to match(ish) the metal roof (which they also installed). 

Money well spent. 

Phase 1 of Operation Cabin Rehab is 90% Complete

I've been horrified by the carpet in the cabin bathroom since the first day I set foot in it. Who carpets a bathroom?? So gross. Finally, FINALLY, my years of silent suffering have paid off.

Here are a couple of before shots. I mean, it was a fine, serviceable bathroom. Just kind of run down and grubby and not at all what I want in a bathroom.

Here it is after we took everything out in preparation for the contractor. It actually looks less worn out. Still, not my jam.

And here we are after the contractor ripped all the fixtures out. The tub was the only thing that stayed. Considering how many toilets have cracked during the winter over the years, there was far less damage to the subfloor than I had anticipated.

And now yay, the contractor has done his magic! The wall color was supposed to be a very, very subtle green, but apparently sitting in a closet enduring years of heat and cold did no favors to my paint. The contractor said he could match the color exactly, which didn't exactly happen, but it turns out I like this better anyway. It's yellow in some lights and green in others. Anyway: look at that lovely floor!!

And here are a couple of shots with everything put back together. I am just so very pleased.

It's way more me.

One final thing will happen in the bathroom: during Phase 2, The Great Window Replacement, we're going to insert a new casement window above the tub. Natural light will be a welcome addition to this room.

My closets' long reign of terror is over

We gave the coat closet a much-needed makeover, after the resounding success of the bedroom closet.

Oh this thing was crammed full.

Not one single more coat could be crammed in there. I literally had no idea what all was on that shelf. I will say that The Container Store's over-the-door shoe holder has been a life saver. All the random crap that has no other home eventually makes it into that thing.

All cleaned out and ready for spackling and painting.

It looked like damn murder site in there.

Better! And since this was a much smaller space it didn't take me the entire day to paint.

Here it is installed, sans a couple of pieces of fascia which came in the wrong length. Long hang on the left, short hang on the right, with the option of removing those middle two shelves and installing another hanging rod should we ever need to do that.

Et voila! I bought all matching wood hangers, and we spent a ridiculous amount of time at The Container Store battling over which baskets and boxes would work best. I'm pretty pleased with the outcome ... believe it or not half of those things are empty.

So in conclusion, if you need to upgrade a closet, hold out for Elfa's annual sale and then DO IT.

Mmmm, Elfa, I Love You

I've been living in my condo for going on 18 years now, and from the second I moved in until now I have hated my bedroom closet with a fiery passion. I finally pulled the trigger and got that shit fixed up right.

Before. The thing I hated most about this closet was the stupid, heavy, always in the way sliding doors. This is my side.

Tom's side. Also note the huge pile of crap sitting just outside the closet. That is spillover, my friends. It is super fun living with a hoarder!

Hated doors: GONE.

This is everything that wasn't clothing that was lurking within and just outside the closet. That is a metric crap ton of stuff. Happily, I'm not the one who has to figure out where it goes now.

Here's what the closet looked like sans non-clothing-related items. Really not that much in the way of clothing. You can see the fruits of my labors over the years to impose some sense of order on the space. Didn't really work.

Empty! Hateful shelf, huge bracket, and pole gone. Just some spackling and then painting can commence.

Spackled.

In the meantime, the supplies were delivered, complete with god-halo. Waaaaaaah!

Painted! So much better. It's not my proudest moment, painting-wise, but I knew it didn't really need to be perfect.

The nice man from the Container Store arrived to install the hardware. Apparently everything hangs from this one bracket, which was attached with several very large screws. Don't judge my uneven taping job.

Where the magic will happen!

Installed! He accidentally cut one shelf too short so a new one is arriving shortly. I think it's just dandy.

And with my stuff tentatively put away. It won't look this nice when Tom imposes his chaos on it, so I am trying to bask in the temporary glow of ORDER. Baskets and sweater bags are a necessary next purchase. I feel like a grown-up with my new fancy closet!

I have to say I'm loving it so far. I'm not in a tremendous hurry to put a new door in. First I need to figure out what kind of door will work best. At the moment I'm thinking accordion door.

Next up, the final closet: the dreaded coat closet.

Well that only took 4 months

Back in July, two weeks after the kitchen remodel was done, our air conditioner crapped out. We spent the next two weeks trying to suck in cold air from the hallway outside the apartment, which was unsatisfactory, to say the least (July in DC: horrible cesspool of suck).

At last, on August 3, one day before our kitchen-warming party, the 50-year-old unit was taken out and replaced, destroying the ceiling in the process. Obviously, the air conditioner replacement people were not about to fix that.

Here are the incredibly stupid "access panels" before the destruction. There was no way a normal-sized human could ever get up there to make repairs, much less remove the entire unit.

Ceiling: destroyed.

And that's pretty much the way it stayed until this week. Hideous, gaping hole, right in my living room. It got so that I didn't even see it anymore.

But then the nice men came and fixed it!

They set up a pretty awesome containment zone so that dust and asbestos didn't get all over the apartment, unlike the ceiling destroyers who left me with inches of carcinogenic dust on every possible surface.

Fixed! With a single access panel that swings down, allowing actual access to the unit.

Amazingly, this process took 2.5 days. Two-by-fours, drywall, spackle, popcorn of two varieties, paint, and god only knows what else transformed the hole into this nice smooth surface. You can still see where the hole was. It was never going to be perfect, but it's perfect enough.

And with that, my living room is finally, finally done.

Closets: My secret shame

The nice thing about closets is that you can shove a bunch of crap in them, shut the door, and forget all that crap exists. This is also the bad thing about closets. Looking into any closet in either my condo or my cabin is to gaze into the abyss. Part of the problem is that I have a husband who can't bear to part with anything. Ever. So in my Quest for Clean Surfaces, what tends to happen is that the stuff that doesn't get shoved out the door gets shoved into a closet.

Well, I'd had enough of that with the linen closet in the condo. I just couldn't take it anymore. And since I'm still attempting Financial Recovery from the Lost Summer of Endless Remodeling, I had to come up with a cheap plan. The domino effect of remodeling is that once you have a really nice room in your house, like a brand new kitchen or bathroom, the old and shabby state of everything else comes into stark relief.

Here's the before. It's a disaster. The top two shelves are taken up with cassettes no one has listened to in 15 years, and a bunch of Tom's precious treasures. Some of the papers were 12 years old or more. Feel free to play Spot the Linens.

The first thing I did was buy some new shelves. I got these at Lowe's, "stain ready," and just needed to lop about 4 inches off of each one so it would fit in the space, because of course, the nonstandard size of everything in my apartment even extends to the width of the damn linen closet.

Two coats of a stain/poly mix later, and they look like this. I'm not super pleased with the stuff I bought. It had to be applied with a brush, and it ran over the edges and pooled up in unflattering ways. On the other hand, it's not like they're going to be on public display, so I didn't stress too much about it.

This is what I used. I was too lazy to go to the Lowe's next door to the WalMart, which is what I should have done to get the stuff I really wanted.

Which is this. I love this gel stain (which I used on the window trim and all my light switch covers), and wipe-on poly is my boyfriend. I didn't have enough gel stain to do two coats per side of the shelves, which is why I ended up with the inferior stain.

Everything cleared out. So shabby.

Icky old shelves thrown away, and two coats of Benjamin Moore Aura paint, the same paint I used in the bathroom. The light green color doesn't come through in the photo at all, but it's so much nicer and cleaner. And the best part was that because I painted the entire interior of the closet, ceiling included, I didn't need to tape.

Better! Wood makes everything warmer and more inviting.

Order is restored! I feel like this is a grown-up linen closet now. No more cassettes or decade-old tax returns (all of which, by the way, has now moved to the floor of the bedroom...baby steps). I'm going to get a blanket bag for the blankets on the floor so they can stay clean and moth-free.

So: A couple of days of staining, four or five hours of painting, and I would guess under $50 of cash expended. Not too bad! I plan to Elfa the hell out of the coat closet and the bedroom closet, and eventually I'm replacing all the gross interior doors, maybe with something fancy like this. But for now I'm happy with my new little linen closet.